As you know, marketing has changed drastically in the last two decades. The old ways involved writing huge checks to trade show organizers, paying trade publications for small ad inserts, hiring creative agencies for Super Bowl ads, etc.—with very little information on performance, besides anecdotal evidence from coworkers and customers.

So why has there been such a slow transformation in marketing organizations? Are these polymaths so hard to find? The Sage Group CEO is advising for the more realistic goal of finding talent with double superpowers: creative + analytical, leadership + digital acumen, content creation + product expertise, innovation + execution.

Although talent can be found with these skills, organizations like to hire people who can hit the ground running. So more often than not, they hire experience and skills over potential and overall competencies, which can be short-sighted. We can all teach someone to use Google Adwords, but it’s harder to teach someone to be strategic.

If you’re looking to get into digital marketing, which I would encourage you to, or wanting to raise your game, here in my opinion some of the digital marketing skills that are often overlooked:

1: The basics of building a marketing website. More people know how to spend money on Google Adwords -- unsurprisingly, Google has tons of free tutorials on how to spend money with them...-- than understanding what technology makes for a secure, reliable, high-performing website, and how to optimize a website for conversions.

2: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are some technical basics (e.g. understanding indexable content, crawlable link structures, title tags, meta tags, and URL structures) but many people overlook the big picture: mapping the buyer’s intent to their search keywords and optimizing accordingly by creating valuable, relevant content on these subjects. There is a near-infinite library of shallow, mediocre content on the web. Knowing a topic in depth takes time and research. Google algorithms are becoming more sophisticated by the day. Smart content ultimately prevails in SEO.

3: How to effectively use major advertising channels. Digital Media Vendors -- Google Adwords, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and retargeting vendors (Google Retargeting, Retargeter, Criteo, Adroll etc.) and the likes, release new ad products every day. Keeping up to date with their offerings and being creative and strategic on how to align these offerings with the company go-to-market plan are what matters.

4: Mobile optimization. Digital marketers must optimize their paid channel programs and search results for smart phones. People are spending more time on their tablets and their smart phones than their desktop -- actually 65% of their time is spent on mobile vs. deskop as this comscore report shows. The consumer space has adopted mobile marketing technologies and tools at a faster pace than their B2B counterparts. The mobile marketing space is evolving quickly, and staying up-to-date with the latest tools, will keep you ahead of the game.

5: Measure everything; optimize everything. Know how to prioritize what to measure and test, and learn what really moves the needle. One can become quickly overwhelmed with irrelevant sea of data (often provided by digital vendors to justify your dollar spent with them). Pick the KPIs that matter, and yes it might take a little while and a little engineering effort on your part to be able to track it. But that’s what it takes.

I started my career when getting black-belt-certified to General Electric 6 Sigma project management techniques was the ticket to getting promoted to your next leadership position.

In the many industries and organizations I subsequently joined, I have been pseudo-trained in various other project management tactics—from industrial practices such as Toyota TQC, or supply chain JIT, to more basic project management tools such as Gantt Charts, Critical Path, Work Breakdown Structure, and countless others—that, to this day, I can’t even recollect.

However, the agile movement, which started in software development and product management over a decade and a half ago, has spread to other industries and functions—in part, to emulate the economic successes of the tech industry, and almost certainly because, as Marc Andreessen once said, “software is eating the world.” Literature on the agile topic still abounds on the Internet and the term has been steadily trending up till today.

​It all starts with a project. This may seem obvious, but much too often, wannabe-progressive marketing teams introduce daily stand-ups, called ‘scrums’, where each team member rambles and boasts about their busy day and long to-do list (the longer the better) ... and they think they are agile!

To be fair, having a well-thought-out priority list for the day/week/month is an excellent start, but it has little to do with the agile methodology—besides transparent communication—if there is no explicit goal/project that the sprint team is working on. To do for the sake of doing is actually rather counter to agile, and the tasks and deliverables easily become what a co-worker rightfully nicknamed “trees falling in the forest.”

In product management and software development, agile teams are working to build a product or a feature. What is the equivalent of a product or feature for a marketing team?

Think about big, hairy projects, challenges, or goals to achieve for customers or other company stakeholders. Here are a few examples that should set you on the right track to pick your first (or next) agile project:

-A critical product launch-Refreshing the look and feel or branding on your website-Optimizing your website for conversion-Increasing pipeline generation for the sales team by X qualified opportunities a month-Market to a new customer or industry segment-A big-bang marketing campaign-Developing a marketing reporting system to track campaign ROI

These initiatives are meant to take the organization to the next level of performance, and require team collaboration and result in collective learning.

(2) Agile project management is not a “Lord of the Flies” free-for-all.

It’s true that one of the core principles of agile is to put together a self-managing, self-organizing, cross-functional team to tackle big initiatives. However, before that, leadership executes strategic agile planning, and decides which initiatives should be prioritized. Agile is not an all-in, bottom-up approach, it is an adaptive method for leadership to take in new ideas and prioritize business goals, and a way for the team to execute on focused initiatives in a more nimble and iterative way.

Once a strategic initiative is assigned to a team and a timebox is defined, the “how” and the “what” to get to the goal is decided—but it’s not without checks and balances—the various stakeholders and executive sponsor engage actively in the sprint reviews.

(3)A marketing scrum does not have to include the entire team.

Since agile teams are formed cross-functionally around initiatives, each initiative/product might have its own scrum. Large meetings are not exactly ideal for a scrum or sprint planning. Agile pundits suggest to never cross the double digits, or as Jeff Bezos puts it, “a two-pizza team”.

Now whom should you assign as the product owner and the scrum master? “Product Owner” doesn’t quite translate to a marketing setting. In Hacking Marketing, Scott Brinker suggests the product owner should be a marketing manager or executive. The scrum master’s role, as in the case of its agile software counterpart, is to facilitate the sprint process.

If so much of the focus is on these agile initiatives or EPICs, what about day-to-day marketing? Does it mean the PPC analyst unwinds his/her current online programs, or the event coordinator drops his/her weekly events, because these programs are not part of an agile project? This leads me to my final point:

(4) If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I find agile to be most useful for finite projects that solve complex challenges, test new ideas, and inspire innovation. The rinse and repeat, “keep the lights on” type of ongoing programs don’t need much agile, just good project management tools (e.g Asana) and enough communication so that the day-to-day work gets equal recognition. I used, for example, all-hand meetings for my team to share their marketing highlights: blog posts, e-books, events, webinars, etc.

Practicing agile the right way is not easy. Leave your comments below. I’d be delighted to read your feedbacks.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with an executive recruiter who asked me if he could pick my brain on how I would go about interviewing a ‘Head of Demand Generation’. Perhaps you are also on the market for top B2B marketing leaders. If so, I thought I would share what I discussed with him and the right questions to ensure you’ll hire the best talent.

Before I jump into a list of interview questions that I believe can help assess the competencies of a Demand Gen marketer, I’d like to preface with some general thoughts on what Demand Generation is. Many people think of Demand Generation as a sub-function within B2B marketing and relegate it to a sub-team within the marketing organization. But, in actuality, Demand Gen is B2B marketing.The new terms “Demand Gen.”, “Revenue Marketing”, “Demand Marketing”, “Lead Generation”, “Demand Creation” or “Growth Hacker” were coined to highlight the new imperative and expectations required of marketing campaigns and the corporate marketing team. Whereas marketing was traditionally seen as support function and cost center, its new mandate is now to drive growth and scale revenue. And this shift of marketing responsibility needed new language, hence the birth of all of these new titles.

So what does this mean for marketing teams and landing top talent? Whether a B2B marketer is working on defining the brand, the messaging, developing new sales collateral, doing a video shoot, creating content, organizing an event, talking with analysts, writing a press release, or planning a go-to-market strategy, in the end, all of these activities work toward the same goal: demand creation and sales pipeline generation. So if a company wants its marketing department to help drive sales, it needs to recruit marketers with a Demand Generation mindset.

In my experience, B2B marketers themselves understand the need to catch up with this new skillset; some embrace the change, some fear it, some put up with it, some hire ‘Demand Gen’ specialists to make up for the gap and some adapt this new mindset fully. You want to hire the latter.In my opinion, the interview questions listed below apply as much to the CMO or VP marketing as to the head of demand generation or, in actuality, any B2B marketing leadership position.MARKETING ANALYTICSThese questions are meant to gauge how in control the marketing leader is of his marketing funnel and his impact on the corporate growth.

Keeping it high level, can you describe the lead management process at your current company; how did you model the marketing funnel, what are its different stages, and how is the hand off to the sales team (field, inside sales, SDR etc.) ?

What’s the conversion rate from marketing/automated generated lead to opportunity/sales qualified lead? And where in your marketing funnel do you think there is opportunity for improvement?

Do you measure your marketing sourced pipeline? If so, how much of the pipeline is the marketing team generating a month, and what percent of the sales pipeline does this represent?

How much time does it takes on average for a marketing qualified lead to convert into an opportunity or sales qualified lead? How do you work with the sales team and inside sales team? How compliant are they with the SLA? What feedback do they have on the process?

What’s your cost per opportunity ?

How big is your marketing database? How many active contacts do you have?

CAMPAIGN DESIGN & EXECUTIONAs you can see, these questions are meant to assess the marketing leader strategic thinking, and how he/she might translate the strategic vision into tactical execution day to day for you.

How do you think about campaigns? What’s your framework in developing campaigns? What are some the main/overarching campaigns running currently at your company?

(This question is meant to get a sense of the interviewee’s strategic and big picture thinking)

Can you describe your marketing campaign planning process?

(This question is meant to evaluate how the marketing leader might go from strategic to tactical, and execute his strategic vision)

How is your team at your current company organized and why?

How do you build your marketing budget and allocate marketing mix?

What are your target customer segments?

How do you set goals for you, your team, and team members, and what do these goals look like?

As you’ve interviewed candidates, what questions have yielded the right answers for you? I would certainly be delighted to hear your thoughts and your own interview questions. Please share below!

How many names—and which names—should you buy for your marketing database? I wish more marketers would be more strategic, asking themselves questions like these about their data needs. When management is pushing for more results and faster results, it’s tempting to just pick up the phone and work with the first data provider that comes your way, with minimum or no specs. But then, you find yourself with loads of data— probably half of which is outside of your target market—but still no data strategy or revenue targets. And you wonder why your conversion rates are so low. If additionally, you invested in a data cleansing tool-—which I highly recommend—you find yourself paying for cleaning and updating useless records.

This kind of shotgun approach to list buying is both rarely effective and very expensive. But data and analytics do not have to be hard.

Marketers often see customer marketing as no more than a sales enablement activity. They put a customer reference program in place to help sales in the late stages of the buying cycle. Then they might develop customer case studies and proof points in the form of brochures that they’ll hand over to field and inside sales teams to engage customers mid-funnel. But rarely do they leverage customer stories in successful demand generation programs for top-of-the-funnel engagement.

Customer advocacy is about getting customers to share their stories and helping them broadcast these stories where your prospects can be reached: on your company’s website, in off-line or online communities, on social media, reading industry analyst reports, and so on.

There are lots of simple and effective demand generation tactics you can use to leverage customer advocates:

Recruit a customer to share his/her success with your product on a webinar,

Help him/her write a blog post and then promote it widely via social and paid media

Invite a customer to speak on the company’s behalf at conferences, tradeshows, and user groups

Nominate your customer for industry awards, featuring his or her story in videos and e-books to be used on inbound and outbound channels.

Also of course, before involving your customers in sharing your company’s message, make sure you have some solid foundations for a healthy customer advocacy program, which includes

Good Customer Experience: Do you have a large enough pool of happy customers? How large a pool will you need? Read my blog on NPS

Strong Internal Processes: Do you have a process in place to recruit your happy customers, and manage the process as they become effective advocates?

Sizable Advocate Base: How big is your current advocate base? What’s the coverage of these customer stories by target market, by phase of the buying cycle, or by tactics and content type? How many of them are willing to share their name publicly.

Also of course, before involving your customers in sharing your company’s message, make sure you have some solid foundations for a healthy customer advocacy program, which includes:

Good Customer Experience: Do you have a large enough pool of happy customers? How large a pool will you need? Read my blog on NPS

Strong Internal Processes: Do you have a process in place to recruit your happy customers, and manage the process as they become effective advocates?

Sizable Advocate Base: How big is your current advocate base? What’s the coverage of these customer stories by target market, by phase of the buying cycle, or by tactics and content type? How many of them are willing to share their name publicly.

You work to make your customers happy. But are you making your happy customers work for you?

The Net Promoter Score is a key performance metric widely used by organizations across the world to measure the state of customer satisfaction with their products and services. It is based out of answers to a very short and simple survey asking customers if they’d be willing to recommend the company to a friend of a relative. The score is calculating by subtracting the percentage of detractors to the percentage of promoters.

In studying customer satisfaction and customer experience topics, he became acutely aware of the limitations of traditional customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys are typically lengthy, (taking days or weeks to conduct and process), have low response rates, and have complex statistical algorithms built in that make it impossible for the common man to verify the soundness of the results. By the time these survey answers are processed and results come in, first, it is too late to win back unsatisfied customers, second, the results have so many shade of greys that they are difficult to act upon and don’t create accountability of the front line employees who have the power to impact the ultimate customer experience.

So he enrolled a small team of Bain Consultants on a research project. They set out to find the one survey question that would be a high predictor of future customer behaviors and ultimately company growth, and that could be collected and analyzed quickly. In December 2003 Fred Reichheld published an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) called the “The One Number You Need to Grow.” summarizing the findings of the research and where the Net Promoter Score metric and concept got introduced for the first time. He later (in 2006) published a book on the same topic titled “The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth”. He expanded further on the subject, discerning more of the practical benefits of the metric, in a subsequent HBR article published in 2009 called “Closing the Customer Feedback Loop”. His research was revised and expanded into another book, co-authored with Rob Markey, a Bain partner colleague, that was published in 2011: “The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World.”

The brilliancy of the Net Promoter Score is in its simplicity, its high correlation with company growth rates in most industries, its simple and quick calculation (no obscure or complex algorithms), and its accessibility to front-line employees.

The very high correlation of the Net Promoter Scores with growth rates can be observed in most industries. But, as Fred Reichheld observed in one of his research papers, this correlation becomes weaker when markets are, for example, dominated by monopolies (e.g. Cable) or highly regulated (e.g. utilities in a non-deregulated market). The correlation can also be distorted in industries with a high barrier to entry (i.e. very few competitors), a high switching cost wherein the customer is unhappy but stuck with the company’s product or service or with an addictive product such as cigarettes. Also, one could argue that a company could give away excellent products and services for free and therefore get a NPS score of 100, but that it would not lead to a sustainable and successful business, thereby invalidating the NPS. But that, of course, is a very unlikely scenario.

In conclusion, the Net Promoter Score is an important and significant predictor for the health and growth of a business but it is not the only one.

Other limitations cited are in the different interpretations that can be derived from a given score. For example, if the company has a zero Net Promoter Score , it could mean that all of their customers are passive or that 50% of their customers are promoters while 50% are detractors. But in both cases, the zero score still is a very good early warning sign that the company is not on a trajectory of growth and that something needs to be done.

Another observation is that only customers’ opinions are included in the calculation of a Net Promoter score. Imagining that a company could compute a NPS for each of its product lines and interrupt production of any one of them with an NPS of less than 80, one would still see the subsequent resulting NPS for the company at higher than 80.(However, that would not be synonymous with growth or a higher market share.)

Critics also point out that segmenting customers in only the three categories of promoters, passives and detractors is highly simplistic and may end up leaving precious information on the table.

Another criticism that often comes up is that non-responders are left out of the equation. Should they be counted as passives or detractors? Should they even be lumped in with responders at all? Nothing is ever perfect and, as a famous statistician once said, “All models are wrong, some are useful”.

Like every metric or model, the Net Promoter Score has its limitations, but understanding them helps in drawing the right insights from an NPS analysis. Advocates further point to the simplicity and practicality of the metric as outweighing any of its potential weaknesses.

About 80% of business-relevant information originates in unstructured form – primarily text. Feedback contained in places like social media posts, online reviews, emails, and survey verbatims contain insights that go beyond a score or 5-star rating. They provide the texture and insight a business needs to understand “Why” a customer likes or dislikes any part of the customer experience. Text Analytics allows companies to uncover countless issues, opinions, and opportunities that would traditionally be buried in pages and pages of text data. Text Analytics allow to uncover emerging issue trends before they balloon into giant problems and capitalize on opportunities that could otherwise be missed. “Precision” and “Recall” are the two high level and common metrics used to measure text analytics software performance. Precision is the proportion of comments that were correctly categorized into a given topic. For example, if a topic analysis system identifies 100 references to the topic “staff attitude” and 90 of the identifications are correct, then precision for this topic is 90%. Recall measures the completeness of your Text Analytics system. If there are actually 120 true references to a topic “staff attitude,” for example, then the system recall for this topic is 75% (90/120.)Read full post here

The controversies that swirl around Bitcoin often obscure one of the most significant technical breakthroughs of the crypto currency: the ability to transfer cash instantly without having to share bank account information with the receiving party.

Secure: No Exchange Of Bank Account Information Technically speaking, transacting Bitcoins over the peer-to-peer network is incomparably safer than sharing your credit card information over the phone, email, internet, leaving your credit card in a plastic folder at a restaurant, or handing it over to random clerks or sales reps multiple times a day. Bitcoin relies on the most advanced cryptographic algorithm to date. The resulting gain in security far outweighs money-laundering concerns. In addition, as recent Bitcoin-related arrests attest, not having to exchange your account information with the receiving party (and vice versa) doesn’t mean your transactions are invisible. And as Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne eloquently pointed out, the favorite currency of criminals still remains the green paper dollar, and yet, for all of that, the greenback is not less viable as a mainstream currency. Analogous to our railway or power grid, the U.S. credit card and payment system has been rendered obsolete and inefficient by decades of underinvestment in technology innovation. Despite being one of the largest payment markets in the planet, the U.S. payment market is probably one of the least secure. Most major markets switched over 20 years ago to the microchip card system, where one’s secret pin number is requested and required upon each transaction. The reason why U.S. credit card companies haven’t made the switch yet? Cost. Upgrading every card and every payment terminal with patented technology would hurt the bottom lines. But as the latest massive hacks to Target, Neimann Marcus, etc. have shown the public, the U.S. payment system is in dire need of an upgrade. Enter Bitcoin, with the potential to disrupt an unwieldy and antiquated status quo. Equipping retailers and consumers with bitcoin accounts would potentially need no infrastructure upgrade. In that respect, Bitcoin is the epitome of a disruptive technology: it’s currently imperfect—for all the issues that have already been mentioned in the press—but it does the job of transferring money from one party to another better: faster, more securely, and cheaper.Fast: Almost Instant Transfer Have you noticed it always takes three business days via traditional media, like wire transfer or ACH, for money to change “hands”? It’s no secret that the ‘holding period’ is a key income stream for financial institutions. This time window is supposed to protect against fraud but with the speed of today’s electronic communication it hardly takes 3 days to figure out that the emitting party does not, for example, have the cash required for transfer. So while there is some transfer risk, the bank is profiting by holding your cash a little longer than strictly needed. A Bitcoin transaction, however, takes about ten minutes. That said, until there is more liquidity in the Bitcoin market, the conversion back to dollars could take a little longer.Good: Digital Currency Will Help The Poor Says Bill Gates Bill Gates, at an “Ask me Anything” Reddit session, shared his belief than “Over the next five years...digital money will catch on in India and parts of Africa and help the poorest a lot.” He used Kenya as an example, where almost half the transactions are executed with M-pesa, a mobile phone based money transfer and microfinancing service offered by Kenyan leading telecom carriers. In countries with weak financial systems and structures, a self-regulating, decentralized system, with low transactional fees holds enormous appeal. In some ways, this is a repeat of the huge success of cell phones in Africa. Many countries in Africa were early mass adopters of cellular technology. Cell phones may jar with most people’s perceptions of the continent, but their success was inevitable on a continent where landline infrastructure was unreliable, network penetration outside the cities was weak, and copper-wire theft was endemic. Installing a few cellular base stations was cheaper, and easier to maintain – and brought millions into the modern economy. Maintaining a functioning and reliable financial system is complex and expensive, and the cost is ultimately borne by the ‘bankable’ consumer. But not everyone is ‘bankable’. According to the World Bank, half of the adult population of the world does not own a bank account. In the U.S., one in every nine households has no checking account. Reasons vary: from not enough money to open and keep the minimum cash balance required by most banks, to not having the administrative paperwork or identification required, to physical distance from a bank branch, and so on. However, the cost of a transaction for people outside of the traditional banking system can be exorbitant: in the U.S., check cashing services can have fees of about 2%, and money orders can be upward of $1 a piece. In contrast, Bitcoins can be sent securely via SMS for free. Despite Bitcoin’s hi-tech nature, the benefits of a decentralized peer-to-peer digital cryptographic currency might be felt most among the financially and socially marginalized. Cost-Effective: More Economical Than Credit Cards For Both Small Businesses And Large Merchants The United States’ addiction to credit is expensive. The 2-3% swipe fees retailers have to pay to credit card companies are being passed on to the consumer as that cost is folded into retailer pricing. Fifty-three percent of general purpose card payments were done using a credit card in 2012 (by dollar value) according to the 2013 Federal Reserve Payment study, i.e. on average retailers have to increase their sales price by about 1.5% to offset credit card fees. Some low cost retailers (e.g. Aldi) don’t accept credit cards for just that reason: to ensure the consumer that they’re getting their best everyday low prices. Margin in the grocery business is so low that 1.5% makes a big difference. So Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne's position is hardly surprising. Partnering with Coinbase costs the retail giant only 1% on conversion fees back to U.S. dollars, a major savings in comparison with the 2-3% transaction fees of credit card companies. Only a debit card transaction might beat that rate. And the bitcoin transfer is secure. Average online fraud rates hover around 1% of total online sales in the U.S. We’re not even looking at the number of people abandoning their online shopping cart because their banks blocked their credit card on suspicion of fraudulent activity. Any dent in this number would be good news for retailers. So, adding bitcoin as a means of payment is more than a marketing move, it’s an financial move. As for now, Coinbase does not offer Bitcoin loans, so for people who like to spend more than they can afford, credit cards still remain the answer. Though bitcoin loans don’t require a big of stretch of the imagination, with the currency gaining more stability, and with a peer-to-peer network vs. a government controlled central bank deciding a base rate, the Bitcoin network would probably be able to provide more market-based, competitive rates to merchants and consumers than credit card companies would be able to offer. As for the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto who wrote the Bitcoin white paper and vanished, taking with him billions of dollars worth of bitcoins that he mined? We are all jealous, but, hey, he compensated himself for his invention and let the world use it for free.Bitcoin Adoption Bitcoin viability relies on a sizable adoption rate of the currency by consumers and retailers, as well as on getting regulators and the financial community on board. Key to Bitcoin success will be the ability of the early adopters and visionaries to educate the rest of us—consumers, merchants and the financial community—to correct some of the misconceptions and alleviate some of the concerns. Another key to Bitcoin success will be the willingness and ability of all the Bitcoin-based businesses to work closely through organizations like Bitcoin.org. As some regulatory missteps or fraudulent activities have shown, the industry will only be as strong as its weakest link. The VC community has been successful in the past in navigating choppy regulatory waters and influencing key stakeholders. Paypal, AirBnB, and Uber are just a few examples of successful start-ups that have been able to make room for their innovation within the regulation framework. Time will tell if the Bitcoin community is able to carve out a place for this elegant technology in the cutthroat, free-for-all world of international finance. Thanks for reading my post this far. Please leave your comments below, I’d love to read your feedbacks and learn more from all of you.

Google introduced Product Listings Ads (PLAs) in the US in October 2012. A month later PLA click-through-rates (CTRs) had already surpassed Google standard text search ad CTRs according to a Marin Software report released in August 2013, reflecting shoppers’ preference for this richer, more visual search result — a PLA includes product picture and price information—. The PLA CTR kept its upward trend since then, as shoppers became more familiar with the Google new search feature. A Marin Software report released in January 2014 shows PLA CTR growing 6% from January 2013 to December 2013 with a peak during shopping season, while Google standard text ad CTR experienced a 13% drop during the same period. According to IgnitionOne Inc. PLAs CTR were about 47% higher than standard Google pay-per-click text ads last year. This shopper preference was not lost on retailers who started to shift their search advertising dollars to PLAs, which also initially happened to have lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs). As a result PLA CPCs increased dramatically, by an astounding 141% from January to December 2013 according to this same Marin Software report. This cost increase might lead retailers to rethink and refine their search marketing spend strategy. The Marin Software report highlights for retailers an opportunity in smartphones, where PLA CPCs have remained lower than their desktop and tablet counterparts, despite higher PLA CTRs. The Marketing Charts article below provides additional insights to retailers. According to Adobe, retailers achieved a somewhat steady ROI on their PLAs despite the increased CPC: a ROI that averaged to about $9 for every dollar spent on PLA according to Kenshoo. Also according to Adobe, Google PLAs would already drive more traffic than Yahoo or Bing paid search, only a little over a year after its introduction.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~As Demand Grows, Retailers Said to Generate More Paid Clicks From PLAs Than Yahoo Bing

By MarketingCharts Staff31/01/2014MarketingCharts.com

Cost-per-click for Google product listing ads (PLAs) jumped by 80% year-over-year during Q4 2013, all the while maintaining a relatively steady ROI, according to an Adobe Digital Index analysis of almost 7 billion paid clicks. It’s the latest data set to show a rapid rise for PLAs, which Adobe says now generate more paid search clicks than Yahoo Bing for some retailers.

According to Adobe, retailers who use PLAs and standard text ads saw roughly 22% of their paid search clicks come from PLAs during the Q4 2012-Q4 2013 period, edging the share seen from Yahoo Bing (20%). (Standard Google text ads generated the remaining 58%.)

According to IgnitionOne, US advertisers who used PLAs increased their Q4 2013 spending by a massive 618% year-over-year (with that high growth likely due to a small base to begin with). CTRs for product listing ads outperformed comparable rates for PPC ads for the duration of the quarter.

Kenshoo’s retail clients upped their spending on product listing ads by 138% year-over-year in Q4, achieving a return of $8.84 for every dollar spent

January is named for the Roman god of looking back and looking ahead. It’s a good time to review some of last year top stories of start-ups successfully cashing-out years of hard work. Twitter’s IPO garnered the lion’s share of media coverage this year. As the second largest social network after Facebook and the darling of ‘celebritweeters’, Twitter has shown vast potential but has also been operating at a loss since it began seven years ago. Although its operating losses have been shrinking year over year, Twitter was still $70M in the red in 2013. It did not seem to worry investors who snapped all the 70 million shares valued at $26 each. At the end of the first day of the IPO Twitter market cap had reached $25 billion. Twitter made the second largest tech IPO in history, after Facebook, besting even Google’s haul in 2004. There were a few equally dramatic start-up IPO’s on a smaller scale, almost exclusively in the B2B high tech sector. Veeva Systems saw one of the fastest rise to profitability by selling cloud-based enterprise CRM to pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Veeva, funded six years ago, never had to raise more than $7 million of venture capital money, and in 2013 investors doubled the IPO opening share price and valued the business at $4.5 billion. IPO’s weren’t the whole story though. Another biggest start-up exit story of the year was Tumblr’s acquisition by Yahoo. The Internet rang out with a collective howl when Tumblr announced their new boss would be the clean-cut, family-friendly portal Yahoo, one of the last ancient survivors from the earliest days of the web. Tumblr users saw themselves as too young, hip and X-rated to survive under the rule of Marissa Mayer. To meet criticism head on, the deal was announced on Mayer’s own Tumblr with the words “Now Panic and Freak Out.” Tumblr earned a healthy $1.1 billion, almost all of it in cash, and a promise to leave the site untouched in exchange for Yahoo gaining a younger audience and easy access to mobile ads. On the other hand, some of the most interesting stories were the exits that didn’t happen. On the M&A front, the left-at-the-alter prize went to Facebook, which was very publicly rebuffed in trying to acquire the start-up Snapchat. $3 billion wasn’t enough to separate Snapchat from its ambitious founder Evan Spiegel. Shortly after, Google excitedly offered $4 billion and better terms, which Spiegel also turned down. All of this for a company with no revenue and plenty of legal challenges. Crazy? Maybe. Part of this strategy was driven by all the commentary that Instagram, which sold itself to Facebook for $1 billion, had far undervalued itself. If Snapchat can build itself into a core software application such as Gmail or YouTube, some analysts argue $30 billion would be much closer to a fair offer. The other big non-story was Box delayed IPO. This popular cloud-based storage company had been primed to go public in 2013, but decided to gave it a miss for another year under intense competition from Dropbox and document sharing software from the big guns like Google and Microsoft. Instead, Box decided to pump up its potential valuation by plugging holes, such as the acquisition of the security company dLoop. Box now joins Square and Seamless as the hot IPO’s to watch in 2014.